Obamacare Causes Thousands to Lose Health Insurance in San Diego

Thousands of San Diego county residents are losing their health insurance plans due to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Although President Barack Obama said that those who like their insurance could keep it, the law only protects those who signed up for plans before the law passed in March 2010.

According to the Union-Tribune:

Faced with the new provision that they cannot exclude patients with pre-existing conditions, and a slew of other new regulations, insurance companies are eliminating most non-grandfathered policies.

About 2 million people in the state now buy coverage on the individual market, according to the California Healthcare Foundation. An additional 26 million get their coverage from their employer, a public agency or Medicare and are not affected.

It is not clear how many have received a policy expiration letter from their insurance company. A Blue Shield of California spokeswoman said the company has sent notices to nearly 10,000 individual customers in San Diego County, and a Health Net representative said “thousands” of its customers in the region were affected. Anthem Blue Cross and Kaiser Permanente, the area’s other two large insurers, did not respond to queries Tuesday.

Kaiser told Kaiser Health News that it had sent notices to 160,000 people across the state, which amounts to about half of its individual policy holders.